Atheists have made a different decision about God to the one made by believers. That is all. I think it can be convincingly argued that atheists have more often applied reason to the question than the faithful have, but this is not black and white, and the application of reason, whilst I admire it as a system, is not an indicator of IQ. In part, faith is the rejection of reason, but with rewards for the faithful that make the choice a reasonable one to make.
Some atheists are clever, some are not. You’re not clever because you’re an atheist, and you’re not an atheist because you’re clever. Trust me, I know some unbelievably thick atheists. The only reason these people don’t believe in God is because they couldn’t hold an idea that fantastic in their heads without going boss-eyed and getting a nosebleed.
I wasn’t only trying to keep the whole audience on side by insulting each of them evenly, though I admit the idea of continuing with one third of them sulking was pretty unappealing. The idea was to reflect my thinking on the subject back to a room full of people and make them laugh in the process. My thinking on the subject of God is at worst ill-informed (I’m quite certain there are enough books out there on God and belief and atheism for me to buy into one or more of them wholesale and give up my angst) and at best in line with a great many people who are just like me – confused. I’m an atheist but it doesn’t work for me. I’d be something else if I could but I can’t. I’m trying to make sense of it by reading, listening, talking, watching, waiting for something to make sense … I’m on hold.
‘There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold … There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold … There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold … There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold … You are currently lost soul number … 6 billion in the queue. An operator will be with you as soon as possible. There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold … There are no available Gods at present, but your worship is important to us, please hold …’
I have a horrible feeling that when I get through, it’ll be to a call centre in Delhi, where a friendly yet aloof man named Unpronounceable will advise me to unplug my faith at the wall and then try switching it back on again.
8
God Delusion – the modern atheist
I READ A WELL-KNOWN BOOK BY PROFESSOR RICHARD Dawkins called The God Delusion. It’s a fascinating book regardless of what you believe and well worth a read. Richard Dawkins says at the beginning of his book, ‘I would like everybody who reads this, by the time they put this book down, to be an atheist.’ Well, I was an atheist when I started reading The God Delusion; by the time I’d finished it I was an agnostic. I was going to read it again but I worried I might turn into a fundamentalist Christian. I think the reason I struggled with the book, despite the well-argued polemic and reasoned discussion of the intellectual liberation atheism can provide, was the unbearably smug, know-it-all tone of the thing. Even if you agree with most of what is written in The God Delusion, you find yourself having to rinse great dollops of smugness off your hands when you put the book down.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what it was I struggled with when I read it. I know that with only a few exceptions I found I shared Professor Dawkins’s take on faith versus science. His position, in case you’ve not heard of Richard Dawkins, is that there is no God. He’s as sure as you can be about that. If it turns out there is a God then I suspect there is a large ‘Have you seen this man?’ poster hanging off the pearly gates with a black and white photo of Professor Dawkins and a reward of 25,000 Eternities in Heaven for anyone who can point to his whereabouts. It’s very difficult to pick out a clear example from the text of The God Delusion where he indulges this off-putting smugness in order to illustrate my point. The God Delusion has no sentences saying: ‘Christians are ridiculous, Muslims absurd and Jews are just mental. All of them are beneath me and the lot of them should bow and scrape before science and its practitioners.’ It’s much better argued than that, but the tone is of a person who knows he has the right answer, and whether I agree with him or not, that insistence and certainty remind this reader of the unbudging and infuriating convictions of the religious zealot.
My problem with The God Delusion was enhanced by the fact that by the time I read it I had heard Professor Dawkins speaking on several occasions. Once you have that clipped, humourless and unrelentingly posh tone in your head, it’s very hard not to read the book in the same voice. There may well be people reading this book who are struggling with the same problem right now. I’m sorry …
The God Delusion is just a book, an important and well-researched book, but just a book. Merely printed words on the page, ordered by a great mind seeking to persuade you that to believe in God is a delusion. You can’t actually hear Professor Dawkins when you read his book, and yet every time I open a copy of The God Delusion I can clearly make out the curt, condescending clatter of the ‘atheist in chief’ filling my head with words. It’s not his fault. He’s clever and he sounds clever. I wouldn’t want him to dumb down. He’s posh and he sounds posh. I wouldn’t want him to do a Tony Blair and plonk his accent in the mud of the Thames Estuary in order to convince me he’s just like me. When I read, if I have reference for how the writer sounds, I hear them in my head. I can’t help it. I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. It’s very nice, if you’re reading a Stephen Fry, to hear Stephen’s languid, confident articulations rippling through your brain. It’s absolutely ghastly if you’re reading Janet Street Porter, and turned out to be inappropriately amusing when I read A Brief History of Time. I should also point out that my lips move when I read. They moved a lot when I read the biography of the Rolling Stones; I was in Accident and Emergency with lip strain by the time Mick and Keith had recorded ‘Brown Sugar’.
I’m told that moving your lips and forming the words in your mouth as you read may be a sign that the reader lacks intelligence. I accept the charge and to be honest I don’t mind particularly. I don’t try to hide it or anything, I wouldn’t chew gum to conceal my ignorance. I’ve seen people chew gum and it almost never makes you look brighter. The more I enjoy a book, the more my lips move. When I read The God Delusion they moved a lot to begin with – it was like singing along to a secular hymn book – then by the end they were more pursed and tense like I’d been kissed by a Dementor.
I found learning to read quite difficult and it took me a long time, which is one of the reasons why I know exactly what a Dementor is. I’m sure I’d have learned to read sooner but I bought a ‘How To Read’ guide book and by the time I’d got through that, the tale of ‘Janet and John’ and their fascinating relationship with ‘John’s ball’ had passed me by. Shoelaces were similarly mysterious to me. I presume whoever it was who invented Velcro had the same trouble and paved the way for us dyslexic lace muddlers to run free in the playground without fear of losing a trainer. Thank you to him. And to Roald Dahl, who helped me not to be scared of books.
I found writing immensely difficult, time-consuming and dull. Thank goodness for the keyboard and the spellcheck. Without which that sentence would have read – thnak goondess for the keebord and spellcheque. When I did manage to write something it was usually sent back covered in red ink as the spelling mistakes and poor handwriting were picked apart by teachers not sufficiently interested in what I was trying to tell them. Only a sliver more precociousness on my part would have seen me send their marking back with a D minus for missing the point of children. I think if I took a sample of my handwriting to one of those people who claim they can tell you all about yourself from the way you hold a pen, their main conclusion would be that whoever’s scribblings were gouged into the page before them must hate writing with a passion. That and I’m a Taurus with a mild fear of spiders. Give me a hostile audience, drunk and baying for a comedian’s scalp, and I’m at
home – offer me a landing card on a plane and I get palpitations and sweaty palms. I have, on occasion, been sufficiently tense at the thought of writing that I have cracked Bic biros between my fingers. I get through most books at the same speed as if I were reading them aloud. It’s one thing to move your lips when you read, and another entirely to do it so fast that people think you’re chewing a wasp.
If the truth be told, I also move my lips when I write. It’s because I imagine telling you what I’m thinking. The point of mentioning any of this tragic dyslexic (very hard word to spell, by the way) tale of woe is that I find reading books like The God Delusion challenging and hard. I don’t mind that, but it means my expectations are high. I want any book I read to reveal great ideas and open doors to new thoughts. It’s pretty unfair on the writers but there it is.
I like clever people. I am drawn to them and find that the way they are able to inspire me usually outweighs the nagging fear that with their superior intelligence they are capable at any moment of turning on me and exposing my shameful lack of knowledge on any range of subjects. I like Professor Dawkins, though I would advise him to avoid appearing on television at all costs. He’s one of those people for whom it does no favours – like Noel Edmonds. I enjoyed The God Delusion and felt excited by the forward motion it seemed to give to secular thinking. Also it pissed me off and I felt awkward about reading it on the train, so I hid it within the pages of a pornographic magazine.
It’s not the good professor’s fault. Dawkins seeks only to make himself clear in his book, and he succeeds. Coming across as smug doesn’t necessarily matter if the argument is clear. It mattered to me, though. In terms of making a case that there isn’t and never was a God, his Greatest Show on Earth is much better. It marvels in what there is to believe in, because we know these things to be true, rather than rummaging through reasons not to believe or seeking to dissuade those who do. The God Delusion is clear and straightforward. For some reason, though, when I try to recall what I actually read in the book, I hear Richard Dawkins’s thin voice saying, ‘When I woke up this morning, I realized I was cleverer and better than anyone else I’d ever met in my entire life. So there didn’t seem any point being nice or polite to anybody. Just insist and insist and insist and insist that I was absolutely correct. Earlier I saw myself in the mirror and I thought, ooh, he looks clever, but not as clever as I am. Me me me me me …’
Every movement needs a leader. Please, imaginary friend up there in the sky, don’t let it be Dawkins. That said, I have enjoyed pasting pages of The God Delusion into copies of the Gideon’s Bible in hotel room drawers. Just to provide a bit of balance and to give lonely businessmen a chance to consider theology and its alternatives between weepy sessions of self-hating onanism and three ‘final’ visits to the mini bar.
In my quest for something to help shove the doubts in my mind into a neat and easily disposable heap, I read several books, including the Bible (Various), God (Alexander Waugh), The End of Faith and A Letter to a Christian Nation (Sam Harris), The Persistence of Faith (Jonathan Sacks), the Qur’an (the Prophet Mohammed and Allah), His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman), several A.C. Grayling books and most of the internet. One book that made a huge impact on me was God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. It’s an angry, uncompromising book with not a single punch pulled. Even Gandhi gets a royal arse-kicking in God is Not Great. It’s as bold and rigorous as you’d hope for from a writer like Hitchens. It’s rare you pick up a book and find yourself pausing to look up from the page and tell a stranger on the train, ‘Wow, Mother Teresa, eh? What a bitch!’
In many ways it’s similar to The God Delusion only much, much drunker. Reading God is Not Great you get the image of Hitchens, a staggeringly intelligent man, pissed off his nut, challenging God to a fight. His blond, wine-soaked, think-all-you-can buffet of a head thrown backwards as he bellows up at the heavens, ‘Come on, you belligerent swine, I’ll fight you, you big barbarous fucker.’ Which is insane, because if we know one thing about God it’s that He moves in mysterious ways. Which I’ve always taken to mean He probably knows Kung Fu. If God turns out to be Vishnu, then Hitchens is in real trouble. Six arms will mean He can get Hitchens in a headlock and punch him, tweak him, flick him and ruffle him all at once whilst still reading to him from The Book of Mormon (a book that makes Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho seem reasonable and sane).
I don’t wish to undermine God is Not Great or The God Delusion. They’re well worth the read regardless of what you believe (as are all the other titles I mentioned). For those of you who haven’t read them, I’ll very briefly attempt to summarize them. My perception of what they are seeking to do is to ask the reader to imagine the scales of good and bad standing before you. Can you see them? Yes? Good. Then they place religion into these scales and using science, history, evidence, philosophy and cultural reference points, they demonstrate how time and time again religion has tipped these scales into the bad. They show, for example, how mankind has turned to religion when we’d have been better off facing the issues directly in front of us. They show how religion has hindered advances in education and science. They show how religion has led us time and time again into appalling acts of violence. They even go so far as to suggest that religion may be holding us back from our next big evolutionary step. All of which is brilliantly well argued in both of these books … until you realize that you can replace the word ‘religion’ with the word ‘alcohol’. And unfortunately all the same arguments stack up in pretty much the same ways.
When you realize how many of the same needs, fears and desires are satisfied by alcohol as are by religion, your perspective on the relative shortcomings of each changes. Unless you’re drunk when the realization hits you, then your perspective on the relative shortcomings of each is overtaken by rapidly alternating optimism and shouty paranoia underpinned by a mysterious and persistent desire for a kebab. Alcohol is a fruity poison we consume in order to escape from the realities, apprehensions, anxieties, mundanities and frustrations of our lives. Religion is a fruity poison we consume in order to escape from the same realities, apprehensions, anxieties, mundanities and frustrations, with the added bonus of eternal salvation and fewer hangovers. Poison may be too strong a word for alcohol; much of it is delicious. Either religion or alcohol are perfectly reasonable things to turn to in the face of trials like parenthood, having a job, not having a job, Friday, getting married, breaking up, Saturday, Christmas, death, Tuesday, passing or failing an exam, Wednesday, a parking ticket, an awkward dinner party, running the USSR … Almost anything apart from driving. Never pray and drive. Nominate a designated driver if you go out on the pray. Trust me, when you see flowers by the side of a road, you can be certain that, somewhere in that tragedy, someone was praying or drinking or both. They amount to the same thing really. They’re both repetitive, mumbly and involve having conversations with people who aren’t there. In the UK we have a very special relationship with drinking where even getting drunk will often be celebrated the next day by getting drunk again.
I’m not suggesting that alcohol can’t facilitate tremendous fun, unless you drink in Wetherspoons, but the sense of community, friendship and the optimism associated with social drinking is remarkably similar to that provided by religion, and the associated feelings of guilt share more than a passing resemblance too. It’s about finding temporary escape hatches from this reality. Booze, drugs, sex and religion slide back the bolt and for a while they throw open the door to somewhere else and we wriggle through to wander around in the space beyond because it feels like it might just be carefree or full of promise or something. It’s different and that’s what’s important, a sense of something other. We drink and we pray and we imagine it all makes sense.
There’s a film I saw online called The Four Horsemen. It’s a two-hour discussion between four leading atheist thinkers, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, in which they take religious ideology over an assault course of ad
vanced secular thought, observing with glee as monotheistic superstition struggles to heave its elderly gut over even the smallest hurdles of reason and evidence. It’s fascinating and provocative. It’s exciting to watch and the clarity of expression and boldness of thought are stimulating. During the film, in which they dissect why in this day and age, given all that we now know, anyone would choose to escape from this reality into something so patently absurd as religious belief, they all appear to be drinking alcohol. One of them drinks quite a lot of it and smokes consistently; two of them seem to be drinking quite fruity-looking cocktails. None of them comments on it. Perhaps it isn’t important at all. It struck me as a mildly disquieting irony. It’s not that I wish they hadn’t drunk alcohol during their meeting. I’m not judging it and it certainly doesn’t invalidate what the four horsemen have to say about belief and atheism. I’m not a puritan teetotaller tutting my way through life with a puckered mouth like I’m sucking a lump of quicklime. You can be clever – the four of them are. You can be confident and certain of your atheism, but the realities of this life are easier and more fun to navigate if you open the escape hatch and get squiffy from time to time. To sit and talk about God with any three of these intimidatingly brilliant minds for a couple of hours would be a privilege but one best enjoyed with some lubrication and followed by a nice lie-down.
The similarities between religious observance and getting drunk are obvious if a little glib. Notice them and it’s amazing how quickly you go from being a curious well-read atheist to a rather dull sober person standing in the corner of the pub asking, ‘Have you read The Beer Delusion? It’s very good. That’s why I only drink digital beer from my iPhone. Wow, I’m lonely. Scotch and a Bible, please, barkeep.’
God Collar Page 13
